No medals for drone pilots: Hagel puts a hold on cyberwarfare award

Only two weeks into his role as the head of the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered the DoD to stop production on a medal that would have been awarded military drone pilots.

Sec. Hagel took control of the Pentagon from former-Sec. Leon
Panetta just recently on Feb. 27, and has issued only few orders
since then. On Tuesday this week, though, the Washington Post
reported that the Defense Department would momentarily halt plans
for a Distinguished Warfare Medal per the secretary’s
request.

The award, initially reported by RT in 2012, was formally
revealed days before Sec. Hagel entered office. It was approved by
his predecessor, Sec. Panetta, and was expected to be offered in
the coming months to servicemen who, while vital to the US
military, don’t necessarily ever enter the battlefield.

When the Associated Press reported on the medal last month, they
said sources claimed it “will be awarded to individuals for
‘extraordinary achievement’ related to a military operation.”
Unlike other combat awards, though, the Distinguished Warfare Medal
was expected to be something that could be obtained without ever
leaving the control room of the drone command centers that are
often thousands of miles away from the battlefield.

“The medal could go to service members who never set foot in
a combat zone, but launch drone strikes or cyberattacks that can
kill or disable an enemy,” the AP reported last month.

Also separating the Distinguished Warfare Medal from other
awards was that this one ranked about both the Bronze Star and the
Purple Heart, two of the military’s most respected honors. Sec.
Hagel, 66, was the recipient of two Purple Hearts while serving in
the Vietnam War.

For now, though, plans for the medal will be put on hold. Sec.
Hagel has asked the military to halt production while a 30-day
study is launched to determine if drone pilots and other
remotely-located servicemen could be awarded without being actually
deployed. Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung says Gen. Martin
Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will have one month
to conduct that study and make his determination.

The Post says that a defense official speaking on condition of
anonymity confirmed that a request from Senate Armed Services
Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and James M. Inhofe
(R-Okla.) to reconsider the award was on his desk when he returned
from Afghanistan on Monday. The source says that Sec. Hagel signed
his name to a directive later in the day, effectively halting plans
for the medal while a thorough review is launched.

In writing Hagel, Sens. Levin and Inhofe said that while they
were “supportive of the new medal,” they had concerns “that
it is given precedence above awards earned by service members for
actions on the battlefield.”

“Hagel’s obviously new, and he’s going to take a fresh
look,” the source tells the paper.